February 9th, 2009. The OpenNebula team is happy to announce the availability of OpenNebula 1.2, the second stable release of the project. This is an important milestone for the project and marks that most of the components of OpenNebula are now in place. This is an stable release, OpenNebula 1.2 will be supported and we will make regular releases for the 1.2 series.

New Features and Highlights in OpenNebula 1.2

OpenNebula 1.2 presents important improvements in the following areas:

Image Management, OpenNebula 1.2 features a general mechanism to transfer and clone VM images. The new Transfer Manager is a modular component that embrace the driver-based design of OpenNebula, so it can be easily extended and integrated with third-party developments and virtually any cluster storage architecture. The new TM allows you to re-use VM images as you can mark them as clonable, and also you can save space as swap images are now created on-the-fly by OpenNebula.

Networking. With OpenNebula 1.0 it is difficult to track the MAC/IPs in use by the running VMs, and its association with physical networks. This mechanism does not scale when dealing with tens of VMs. The new Virtual Network Manager module allows you to define virtual networks and it leases IP-MAC pairs to VMs, so you do not have to keep track of the addresses in use. In this way it is pretty much like an embedded DHCP server. Additionally, the leases are built in such a way that you can easily obtain the IP form the MAC when booting the VM. OpenNebula 1.0 networking is still supported, in case you do not want to use the new functionality.

Robustness and scalability, OpenNebula 1.2 has been tested in the management of hundreds of running VMs to ensure that the code meets production level requirements.

General Improvements in OpenNebula 1.2

The build system has been improved, now it can better detect the location and compilation flags for the libraries used by OpenNebula. Also support for gcc 4.3 has been added.

The logging facilities of OpenNebula core now includes support for logging arbitrary driver messages, that likely will help in debugging wrong configurations.

Finally several components underwent changes to make more coherent the naming pattern. These changes include the command line interface, that also got rid of
superfluous messages and the internal database schema.

We would like to thank the great labour done by Soren Hansen, reflected in submitted patches that helped to get OpenNebula closer to work with Ubuntu and Debian and cleared subtle and important issues: 54,59, 63, 65, 68, 69.

Supported Platforms

Solved Bugs

Known Issues

Under some configuration using ballooning with the Xen hypervisor, the apparent free memory of a cluster node is less than the actual one, so no new VMs are allocated to it. A solution for this is described in ticket 54

The KVM monitoring script may provide wrong information because it calculates FREECPU and USEDCPU based on the top utility. A solution for this is described in ticket 68

OpenNebula 1.2 uses tap:aio: for virtual disks. Some Xen versions does not work with it and needs the file: interface. If that's your case, just change line 252 in src/vmm/XenDriver.cc